American History Hit - President James K. Polk: Lies, Warmongering & the Myth of Success

Episode Date: December 20, 2023

Is this the only president to have achieved all of their campaign promises? James K. Polk, the 11th Commander-in-Chief successfully led the nation through ambitious expansion during his single term.Don is joined for this episode by Professor Amy Greenberg to find out about Polk's presidency and successes, his warmongering, his lies and his workaholic tendencies. They also discuss his wife, Sarah, and her political influence.Amy is head of the Department of History at Pennsylvania State University and author of 'Lady First: The World of First Lady Sarah Polk', and 'A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico'.Produced by Freddy Chick and Sophie Gee. Edited by Anisha Deva. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Don’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORYHIT1 sign up now for your 14-day free trial https://historyhit/subscription/You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Welcome to Tennessee's State Capitol Building here in downtown Nashville, mounting the marble stairs that scale the terraced grounds of Capitol Hill.

We see the structure's classical facade high above us, as if poised upon a pedestal. Grand Corinthian columns support the Gable pediment, its roof-capped with a central tower. To the right of the building, beyond the statue of President Andrew Jackson perched on his steed, we discover the final resting place of the final president in the Jacksonian era. James K. Polk. It is a sight of austere grandeur. Today, visitors wander the grounds, workers eat their lunches in the shade, and one man in a dark suit stands alone by himself, contemplating the tomb.

For a moment he is there, and in another he's gone. It gives us pause. That was odd. Did we imagine him? Was he there and then not? Was he anything at all? Or maybe he was a ghost. The ghost of James.

K. Polk, or his legacy perhaps, stubbornly living on. It is America's right to stretch from sea to shining sea. Not only do we have a responsibility to our citizens to gain valuable natural resources, we also have a responsibility to civilize this beautiful land. Hello and welcome back to American History Hit President's Series with me, Don Wildman. Glad to have you. Today, we're going to be introduced to the 11th President of the United States. The last and possibly most dedicated of the Jacksonians. Young Hickory, he was called, James K. Polk. I am joined for this conversation by the inimitable Amy Greenberg from Penn State University to explore the Polk story, a complicated one. On one hand, he is the president most associated

with, you know, sea to shiny sea, manifest destiny, oversaw a tremendous expansion of American territory in his time. But while he served, he was also known as a warmonger and a liar. workaholic, certainly. Polk was possibly the only president to have fulfilled every one of his election promises. Hello, Amy, nice to have you on American History hit. James Knox Polk, 11th president of the United States. A gnarly piece of work this man is. He is one of those 19th century Democrats that really furrows the brow, isn't he? He really is. Yeah, he's a piece of work. So this is a big life, you know, president of the United States. He starts, though, in a log cabin, as so many did in those days. He, however, gets on with a prosperous childhood, thanks to his dad, having moved from North Carolina to Tennessee.

Forgive me for staking my ground here. But I see in this little part of his life the sort of microcosm of so much of his attitudes. They move from North Carolina to Tennessee to take up residence on land formerly indigenous tribes lived on. And so begins this Western march towards manifest destiny, right? Absolutely. I mean, it's really perfect that he becomes the president most connected with territorial expansion, with the idea of territorial expansion. He never would have even gotten elected if he hadn't told the American people that he would

bring the rest of the continent under American sway. And it's totally perfect. You're right. I mean, his family gets rich like so many other families did in what was then known as the Southwest. By moving from an established state, one of the states. from the time of the revolution, North Carolina, onto this land that the U.S. just got by dispossessing Native Americans. And he doesn't just move onto land, which we could really say was stolen. He brings slaves with him. So it's not just about taking land. It's about bringing slaves

and forcing slaves to work that land and getting rich off that. One of the other aspects of this journey is that it really takes it out of the kid. You know, James Polk is a sickly child. I don't know what it was that he was, but it was a big part of his life and kind of comes back at the end. He may never quite recover from these early days. That's right. Doctors now think it was bladder stones. So kidney stones, but in the bladder. And he had an experimental surgery when he was a teenager to remove these bladder stones that totally changed his life in more ways than one because it most likely left him unable to father a child. But it also gave him this health and vigor, which he had never had as a child. And I think he made the most of that. I mean, this is a guy who regularly works 16 hour days. His political career is an unusual one. First of all, we have to just say it right out at the beginning. He is a protege of Andrew Jackson. Boy, is this guy in the shadow of the great Andrew Jackson for those fellows who felt that way. His father is a big supporter of Jackson's political career and then onward it from there. He begins to sort of ride those coattails all the way to the White House. There's no other politician is as closely associated with Andrew Jackson. I mean, James's nickname was Young Hickson. as opposed to old hickory. And my favorite detail about the relationship between Polk and Jackson is that supposedly Jackson is the one who recommended to James that he marry Surrey Childress. So not only did Jackson know the Polk family well, he knew the Childress family well and he was the matchmaker. So yeah, James didn't do anything that wasn't cool with Andrew Jackson. And Andrew Jackson is the person who suggested that he become the nominee.

in 1844 for the White House. He is a lawyer. He went to North Carolina for that. He becomes this lawyer who figures out pretty quickly that this is his trajectory in life. When he becomes a member of Congress, he eventually becomes Speaker of the House under Jackson. Am I correct with that? That is true. Yeah.

And really learns the levers of power at that point. And he's pulling the levers for Jackson, which is to say anti-national bank, expansionist policies, indigenous people, you know, pushing them off the lands, all that sort of stuff that Jackson is all well known for, gets carried forth by Polk. This is one of the reasons I think it's really important to say about Polk is that Andrew Jackson's legacy goes on so long in the 19th century. I mean, it's decades after he was president. He is still felt, and Polk has a lot to do with that. It's a really great point, Don. I don't think scholars have really talked about that as much as they should. But yeah, why does Andrew Jackson end up becoming the major figure in American politics

before the Civil War, it really is because he leaves this imprint on all these other politicians and none more than James. James carries out his policies. James talks about him. James sort of like heroizes him. And then that baton gets passed to Stephen Douglas. It's just like a straight line through these politicians who all saw how Jackson did this, which was such a seminal moment in American early presidential politics, the way Jackson sort of steered the country an entirely different way. They all saw that as the way it was going to be. And off we went. When he finally leaves Congress, goes back, he becomes the governor of Tennessee, but only one term governor, which is interesting. He runs again and he loses several times. There's a point in this man's, I guess,

midlife that he thinks his political career is kind of over. And by virtue of the strangeness of presidential election politics in those days, he ends up in the mix for the 1844 campaign to become president in 1845. Let's talk about that a little bit. He's opposing Henry Clay. This guy does not get enough press in American history, in my opinion. Henry Clay is great. He never became president, but his views on what the country should look like, on economic development, on the direction that the nation should head,

in many ways, just as important as Jackson's. People just don't know him because he didn't win, but he should have won in 1844. But the reason that Polk won is because Polk was speaking directly to the people of America and telling them, look, there is a destiny for our nation. And that destiny is going to be obtained by gaining as much land as possible. So he was this expansionist that caught the imagination. I'm really learning a lot. I hope the listeners feel the same way in these presidential episodes that we do

because what starts to emerge is the schism between those who believe in building the country from the infrastructure, from the center, you know, outward, utilizing the federal government to fund that, you know, through state budgets as well, but primarily federally funded national bank projects like canals, like roads, like all the stuff and never mind communication technology that's coming on and all the rest. And then there's the candidates from the other side, like Polk, who just see this other kind of dream for this country. It's just got to get bigger. It's got to expand because what is expansion? It's cheap land, if not free land. If you can do that, A, you're going to get a lot of people voting for you, but also you're going to build a kind of country that

they believe in, which is this continuation of the Jeffersonian Republic. And again, this goes back to what you mentioned about his childhood, right? Like, how did his family get rich? His family got rich by moving west and building something they would say out of nothing. All over my notes here, I have lying being done by this man. This is a interesting theme about him. He is a gnarly guy, known to be a kind of a dark force in presidential politics. He utilizes lying to a large degree in his politics. Is that true? Yeah, it is. So I think it's really hard for us now, given the political context that we all exist in, to imagine a time when politicians were not supposed to lie. Lying was seen as disreputable and lying was seen as below the belt. So one of the amazing things

about Polk is, as far as I can tell, he is the first president to directly lie to members of his own party. And people come out of meetings with him convinced that he's going to do what he says. And then when he doesn't do it, they are flabbergasted because their life experience hasn't set them up to be lied to by the leader of their own party. It's his modus operandi, isn't it? It's one of the things he's learned to do as a politician, clearly before he was president. But now we make such a cynical joke about politicians. You're saying that this guy was one of the beginnings of this. I'm sure not the only one, but definitely one of the most notable users of non-truths, untruths. He is literally the first president that I have been able to locate who lied to his allies.

Manifest Destiny, as you mentioned, is his primary theme, the expansion of the United States. He will end his presidency having added millions and millions of acres to the mainland of America by virtue of those things that has happened in his presidency, which we'll now talk about. But that is a big thing that people generally think of as Polk, which, you know, on the surface doesn't seem like a bad thing at all. That's a big achievement. But how he gets there is what we're about to talk about. Fair to call him a warmonger, yes? Yeah, I'd say that's a pretty good assessment. The Mexican-American War happens under his terms. We have done an episode on this that I invite people to go listen to and to hear the detail of this whole thing. But we can kind of skip through it quickly. This would be an untruth that he created right here. What had happened in Texas was the Texas River. revolution, 1836, that is a separate republic at that point. Certainly, James Polk wants this to be joined to the United States. Under Tyler, there's an attempt to annex it at the end of his presidency. That stalls. It's going to be under Polk that this happens. But in order to grab it, he's going to have

to fight the Mexicans who say, no, no, no, this is our country. And if you're going to send troops in there, which is what Polk does, they come back and start shooting at him. And that begins a war. I'm sorry, it's pretty simplified, but that's the beginning of it. So it's pretty clear from the records that Polk knew what he was doing in terms of baiting them on in terms of this act? Yeah, there's no question. Polk sent half of the regular U.S. Army down to a disputed area in the southern part of what was Texas. And then Secretary of State Marcy under Polk's direction sent a map down to the soldiers down there that kind of drew a line and said, this is Texas. And all of the soldiers there, including officers, just said, this is ridiculous. This is not Texas.

This is clearly Mexico. So, yeah, Polk knew exactly what he was doing. And the officers themselves wrote and said, we are being sent down here in order to foment a war. It goes on for a number of years. We win, having fought our way all the way to Mexico City. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago is what comes out of this, which ends up giving us Texas,

much of the southwestern and up into California areas of what is now the United States. It's an extraordinary real estate grab that we've done through these means. But it really does stain the American character for a lot. lot of people even then. Grant included, right? Absolutely. Most of the officers see it as unjust. Grant famously says later on his life that it was the most wicked war that one country ever fought against another. And Grant says that if he had been braver as a young man, he was a lieutenant during the East Mexico War, that he would have opposed it. This is where I said before,

there seemed to have been this imprint being done on this guy at an early age. You know, the idea of moving westward, of course, as you've said, reemphasizes itself throughout this whole entire life, let alone the political career. But it's also this sort of sickly child inflicting himself under this job. You know, this is where he comes from. And that's so often the case with this sort of, it's the wrong term, but that Napoleon mentality of, I'll get you, seems to be the chip that Polk is carrying on his shoulder throughout his career. So Sarah Polk was the first person to have the song, Hail to the Chief, played when a president. entered a room. This is very common in the U.S. now. They play Hale to the Chief. So Sarah

started that, and the reason that she did it is she was worried that nobody would notice her husband when he entered the room if she didn't pay that. Like, he was a small, not particularly distinguished looking. So this was a way to let people know that somebody important was in the room and also to, you know, reflect the gravitas that this guy felt like he deserved and his wife felt that he deserved as well. His father's an enslaver. Obviously, it's the South in those days. he himself carries this forth. Tell me about his career as a plantation owner. It begins in Tennessee, but then it goes to Mississippi, right? It's really not great. It's a problem. And, you know, a lot of times people will say, well, it was a different time. A lot of people owned enslaved people. Can't really

hold that against them. People that say that, I'd like to point out that he was a disingenuous. I mean, he lied about his slave owning, too. So even according to the norms of the time, what James K. Polk was doing on his plantation was not okay. And what I mean by that is that when he ran for president, his campaign said, oh, he never buys or sell slaves except to keep families together. So, you know, he'll sell a man if the man's wife lives on another plantation or, you know, vice versa, buy the wife to bring the family together. But in truth, when he was president, he secretly was buying teenagers from the eastern part of the United States, from Virginia and North Carolina, and shipping them out to his plantation in Mississippi that was on such an unhealthy area, low ground. there was a lot of mosquitoes, and the conditions there were so bad that there was this incredible

mortality rate on this plantation. I've always wondered about this. The famous fact of cotton farming in those days is that they just ruined the soil, you know, that they stripped the soil out. The science wasn't known in those days. It wasn't necessarily that fault. But they had to get new land. They had to get new farmland.

And so that went south. And so as that progress was made towards the south, those enslaved people got sent further and further away. And that just became a kind of metaphor for the hellhole. that this was. You were further and further away from Washington, D.C., I suppose, and all kinds of chances of escaping, really, went away as soon as you ended up in deep Mississippi for sure. So they would have been aware of the cruelty of this act, for sure. Of course they would. And the reason that we know that they were aware of it is that they said it didn't happen. So this is a great example

of, you know, people doing something that even by the ideas of the time were terrible, like literally buying 14-year-olds and 15-year-olds, taking them away from their families and sending them to a plantation where the mortality rate was very high because you weren't just destroying the soil, you were destroying the people that were working the soil. Of course. We have to do an episode on the timeline of abolition because to understand how public and how the discourse was public in these days, this is 18, you know, mid-1840s, it's being widely discussed.

It's a hugely controversial issue at this point. We're only a short distance away from the Civil War at this point. So somebody like Polk knows exactly what he's doing and he knows he has to be duplicitous about it or he's going to get a lot of trouble in the newspapers. He's supposed to be the president for the whole United States, that old cliche. But in his case, he's doing something right in the presidential mansion that is not necessarily illegal at this point, but certainly inappropriate. Can I also just say about the plantation that when he bought this land in Mississippi, he said to his wife, well, we're either going to make a lot of money or we're going to lose a lot of money. So he sought as a gamble and he just went all in for it.

He is, one must give him this credit, a very, very hard worker. He's effective in this regard. He's determined, not unlike Andrew Jackson, his mentor. He works hard to get the things done that he wants to get done. Expansionism wasn't just down in the south in the chances to get more land with Mexico, but also up in Oregon. This was a big controversial issue back in the day in his four years as president. Tell me about the debates about the border, which are with Great Britain, right? Absolutely.

So what was known at the time as Oregon country was jointly controlled by Great Britain and the United States. There's different ways to look at this territory, which if you want to know what it looks like now, it's basically all British Columbia. So all of British Columbia and what now is Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. And people in the United States in the North, they believed in Manifest Destiny too, but the people who didn't own slaves, the northerners in the U.S., they thought their manifest destiny laid in Oregon country. Everybody talked about how fertile the land was, how healthy the climate was. So people in the North really saw this as their destiny was to take this from the British. And there was a lot of anglophobia at the time, memories still of the American Revolution. So there were just as many people in the northern part of the United States who wanted Oregon country as people in the South who wanted Texas to be taken from Mexico. But you had earlier said that he was a warmonger. And I of course totally agree with that. that Polk very explicitly did not fight a war against Great Britain in order to get Oregon country. He was happy to split Oregon country with Great Britain, ultimately because of two things.

One, he knew that the U.S. would have a much harder time in a war against Great Britain. And two, because there were no enslaved people up in the Oregon country. So we split Oregon country with Great Britain, probably could have gotten more of Oregon country from Great Britain. But Polk wasn't interested in that. He knew he couldn't fight two wars at once. He knew he needed to fight a war against Mexico. And he was racist enough to think that fighting war against Mexico wouldn't be hard, which, of course, it did end up being. This is what we're talking about actually comes before Mexico in his presidency.

That's a pretty immediate thing that he starts to work on. It's 5440 or fight. That's the slogan, which is referring to the latitude lines that define where the Oregon territory really was. Just to be clear, my understanding of this is Oregon country includes what later becomes Washington, right? Not just Washington, but also all of British Columbia. So when they get this border settled down, it's basically what is today the Washington Canadian border? Correct. Okay. And then later on, whatever happens, happens that Washington carves itself out from what is the Oregon thing. It's a huge piece of land. I mean, now you're starting to see it all come together. And this is where we just

have to have a sort of come to Jesus talk here. My family lives in California. I love California. It's like a formative part of my life going and backpacking in Yosemite. And, you know, a whole thing. It's just a fantasy world for me from my youth. The last thing on earth I would have wanted was to be visiting Mexico instead of going to California. It's like this weird problem that Americans have, certainly of a liberal, you know, stance. Like, ouch, all this terrible stuff happened in the 19th century. We stole all this land.

But we're really glad we have it. You know, and we sing C to C proudly, you know, from time to time. Where do you come down from that? having studied this as a historian, having come to terms with it yourself. Well, I'm a Californian. Oh. Born and raised in Southern California. End of story.

But you know what? I'm so glad you brought this up because it isn't an either or. People who have looked into this have made what I think is a very convincing argument that we could have gotten California from Mexico through negotiation. Mexico was broke. They were broke and they were desperate. And we could have bought California from Mexico. Well, wait a minute.

So that is a Polk point because he offers to. To settle the issue of Texas with a purchase, right? He offers to settle the issue of Texas with a purchase by using the worst negotiators possible. He sends a racist guy down in Mexico to negotiate this who the Mexicans already hate. Again, on purpose, was this a manipulation? I don't think so. I think he was so unaware of how Mexico understood the U.S., how Mexico saw the U.S. He either didn't care or he just didn't know about it.

So he sends this guy John Slydale, known racist, already hated by people in Mexico, down to negotiate the sale of the southern portion of Texas. Because it couldn't have been seen as an easier choice to send an army down there and fight a war. He could have lost. He thought the war would be done in one campaign. Okay. Well, it almost was, wasn't it? He thought if the U.S. went down there, defeated Mexico in one battle, that Mexico would give up. Wow.

So having been raised as a Californian, I mean, born as a Californian, you're saying, that all those territories we got through unsavory means, let alone pushing indigenous tribes off, but these wars and this stuff could have been done in a more elegant fashion and therefore had a different kind of story of America, really. You know, this is a counterfactual history or what historians call a counterfactual history. There's no way to say what exactly could have happened. But all I can tell you is that scholars have looked into this and they've written long books and they've said, this territory could have been obtained through negotiation. You've mentioned Sarah Polk several times. She had a huge part in the

creation of the James Polk legacy, for sure, but a big part of the presidency as well. Yes, she did. She's a fascinating woman. She's a really, really powerful political figure that nobody knows about because part of her way of operating was to fly under the radar. So she never let anybody know exactly what she was doing. And she always called herself Mrs. Polk. And she She said the right things about how women should be deferential to men, while at the same time doing exactly what she wanted. How much were women involved in the politics of Washington, D.C. in those days? Well, I mean, a lot of people would say that they weren't involved at all. But actually,

if you look closely, rich women and women who were connected by family to politicians were actually doing a lot. I mean, of course, this is a time period before women could vote. So it's easy to think, well, if they weren't voting, they weren't political. But that isn't true. Women were actually doing quite a bit. They were lobbying politicians. Well, they ran the social network there. There was a season of the politicians in town. And during that time, what did you do? You went to each other's houses. There wasn't anything else to do. And so those women ran that circuit, which had to have been a hugely important. Who's sitting next to who at the tables? And all that stuff is being done under the radar in a very networky sort of way. There's a lot of people, a lot of wives at work there. Yeah, and Sarah Polk was a master of that. When James was Speaker of the House of Representatives, she took rooms in a boarding house where a number of members of the Supreme Court lived so that she could basically cultivate Supreme Court members. After he leaves office, it's only a one-term presidency. Was this by choice by him or not? It was. He was the first president to say he would only serve one term. His idea was that if he said he was only going to serve one term, that it would allow the party to come behind him and support him. no idea that what that really meant in practice was that everybody would start jockeying to run in 1848. He thought it would unify the party.

He dies very soon after he leaves the White House. Many have claimed he worked himself to the bone, but he probably died of some other Washington disease. So he did work himself to the bone. His own doctor basically repeatedly said he was going to die if he didn't work less. But he caught cholera on a basically tour via steamboat through the south, and he died of cholera. But if he hadn't been so weakened already, he could very well survive that. It's a dark conversation where James Polk is concerned, but not entirely unique. Where do you think

he falls in the scheme of things? You know, he's pretty celebrated for the accomplishments of expansion and so forth by many people, but we're having a fairly negative conversation about this guy. So a lot of people think Polk was a great president. And the reason that they think that is that he supposedly had four goals as president and he accomplished all of them in one term. So there's this basically myth about how effective Polk was. But the problem with the myth is that it's entirely made up and it was created in the light 19th century. When you really look at Polk's presidency, he had a number of goals that he'd not accomplish, foremost among them, being bringing Cuba into the United States. So he was as passionate about annexing Cuba as he was about annexing California. But we

don't talk about that because it didn't happen. And it's not part of the myth about how successful he was. So I don't think Pope was really a great or even a particularly successful president. But if you had a different outlook on certainly manifest destiny and what we're talking about is cruelties and war mongering and so forth, you would have a different outlook on James Polk, right? That is true. It's how one feels about those issues that really colors your opinion of this guy. And then Sarah Polk, like so many of these wives after the fact, becomes the caretaker of his legacy, right? She's the one that builds this story. I've mentioned that he worked really hard. He was a former Speaker of the House. You know, he understands the politics and how to do what he needs to do. A bit of a control freak, perhaps. Oh, he was absolutely control freak. He corrected the work of minor clerks. So one reason why the guy never slept, and I'm serious here, like his wife would go to sleep at 10 p.m. He would still be up and they would be up at five. He doesn't sleep at all. And the reason why is he is looking over every piece of paperwork that comes

out of the White House and correcting it. You mentioned before that his legacy was sort of burnished up in the late 19th century. That brings to mind lost cause thinking and all the retelling of that entire slavery story, really. It makes me wonder how many of these pre-Civil War, certainly democratic presidencies, were revised along with the story of the South and the struggle, as opposed to fighting for slavery, but rather for state's rights and all the stuff that happens. Polk is part of that revisionism, isn't he? Yeah. I mean, one thing that Sarah deals with in the decades after the Civil War is the fact that the Republican Party, the Republican Party is basically completely controls the United States for the first couple decades after the Civil War. And they absolutely reject what the Democrats were doing before the war. So in their opinion, James K. Polk was a land stealer. He was a slave owner. He was the worst kind of Americans. So the entire Democratic Party and all of those presidents, accepting Andrew Jackson, who really, of course, you know, he's too important to reject. They all come under a lot of negative scrutiny in the decades after the Civil War.

Serving their own cause versus the United States cause. That's a good way to put it. Or at least trying to straddle them in some way. I just want to say, I mean, I can understand someone who's of a conservative bent listening to this conversation tearing their hair out. Like, are you kidding me? A third of the country wouldn't exist without this presidency. I get it.

And I also want to speak to my own hypocrisy and double standards. because I can't go to California so happily without knowing that the country has it as a state, et cetera, et cetera. There's so much about this country out west for sure that has to do with kind of suppressing your reaction, your own moral objections to how it was acquired. And that's part of being a modern, you know, 21st century American for sure. It's a legacy that we all live with and we have to acknowledge it. I just want to own up to that myself. Yeah, that's a great point. I'll own up to it too. This is a difficult story. I've had many.

conversations with European friends for sure and try to explain it to them. And, you know, you come back to, well, it's all the time and you have to put yourself in their shoes and all these kinds of things. But it still requires reconciling yourself to some pretty nasty stuff that was undertaken by some pretty gnarly people. Amy Greenberg, historian at Penn State University and the expert on James Polk, author of Lady First, Lady First, Sarah Polk, and A Wicked War, Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico. Wow, pretty colorful stuff there. Thank you so much, Professor Greenberg. Thank you, John. Hello, folks. Thanks for listening to American History Hit. Each week, we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays. All kinds of great content, like mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements, to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And we'll while you're at it, share with a friend.

American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support. Thanks so much.